The Law Written on the Heart

A Review of Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural
Law
by J. Budziszewski (InterVarsity Press, 1997)

Phillip
E. Johnson

Paul wrote in Romans 2:15 that gentiles who know nothing of Moses
or Christ may nonetheless show by their deeds "that the requirements
of the Law are written on their hearts, their consciences also
bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending
them." J. Budziszewski, who teaches in the Departments of
Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas, and whose
work frequently appears in First Things and other journals,
explains that this law is what philosophers call the "natural
law." It is the bedrock moral understanding that we can't
not know, however hard we try to evade that knowledge,
because our consciences bear witness to it.

When our consciences accuse us, and we are unwilling to repent,
all we can do is to smother our knowledge with rationalizations
and recruit others to vice. As Paul said in Roman 1:32, "Although
[depraved people] know God's righteous decree that those who do
such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these
very things but also approve of those who practice them."
Just as misery loves company, sin craves social approval.

Most of Written on the Heart consists of a highly readable
and stimulating survey of the history of natural law thinking
from Aristotle to the present. Aristotle, who knew nothing of
the Judeo-Christian God, developed his common sense ethical philosophy
by examining the actual practices of people who were reputed to
be wise and happy. Thomas Aquinas melded Aristotelian ethics with
Roman legal scholarship and Catholic doctrine to create a synthesis
that still has a powerful attraction for those who study it sufficiently
to master Thomas's categories. John Locke, who meant to find a
stronger basis for law, unintentionally undermined the project
by grounding knowledge on sense experience exclusively. Eventually
his empiricism led to utilitarianism, which attempted to rebuild
moral philosophy on a dismally inadequate foundation, namely our
desire for pleasure and aversion to pain. Utilitarianism led inexorably
to pragmatism and relativism, in reaction to which some Roman
Catholic natural law philosophers (especially Germain Grisez and
John Finnis) have attempted to revive natural law theory on a
secular basis.

I would have added another major figure to this historical survey:
the immensely influential American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr. Mr. Justice Holmes thought of law as a science that, like
the natural sciences, rigorously excluded such irrelevancies as
morality and metaphysics. "If you want to know the law and
nothing else," he wrote in The Path of the Law (1897),
"you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the
material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict,
not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct... in the
vaguer sanctions of conscience."

From the standpoint of the practicing lawyer, Holmesian law is
nothing more than "the prophecies of what the courts will
do in fact." The bad man and the good man alike will guide
their conduct by such prophecies, because neither wishes to come
into conflict with the organized force of the state. From the
standpoint of the rational judge or legislator, the rules which
the prudent bad man observes are themselves derived from policy
sciences like economics and psychology. The ultimate purpose of
law is to achieve whatever goals (such as prosperity and safety)
the public sees fit to endorse through the political process.
Whether people's inclinations are good or bad is of little concern,
because bad and good alike can be made to obey the law.

Holmes downgraded tradition as a source for law, famously remarking
that "It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule
of law than that it was so laid down in the time of Henry IV."
He had an even lower regard for notions of morality, regarding
them as unscientific relics of outdated religious traditions.
He conceded that a law which too blatantly transgressed a community's
moral standards might be unenforceable, but then trivialized the
point by illustrating it with the comment that "I once heard
the late Professor Agassiz say that a German population would
rise if you added two cents to the price of a glass of beer."
Never one to pull his punches, Holmes mused that "I often
doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance
could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted
which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside
the law." In place of the moral law written on the heart,
Holmes gave us state coercion based on science. That's about as
far away from Thomas Aquinas as you can get.

Such nihilism also puts the political community and the pirate
gang on the same moral footing, since both are based on pragmatism
and coercion. It is no wonder that people continue to search for
a new kind of natural law that agnostic modernists can accept,
but the immediate prospects are not promising. Germain Grisez
postulates that there are seven basic forms of the good, including
justice, friendship, holiness, life (including procreation), knowledge,
and skill. Each of these is said to be "irreducible,"
so that it is forbidden, for example, to sacrifice one basic good
to achieve another. Budziszewski's brief critique of this complex
theory is devastating: its rules are arbitrary, and they threaten
to turn the easy questions (like whether it is permissible to
adopt a celibate lifestyle in order to pursue holiness or knowledge)
into unresolvable dilemmas.

James Q. Wilson's 1993 book The Moral Sense asserts that
"we have a moral sense [and] most people rely on it even
if intellectuals deny it, but it is not always and in every aspect
of life strong enough to withstand a pervasive and sustained attack."
That may sound like the law written on the heart, which can be
obscured but never erased. As a scientific materialist, however,
Wilson cannot ground the moral sense in anything more solid than
"feelings," meaning emotional reactions which he deems
to have been created by natural selection. The well-known problem
with this approach is we have many conflicting feelings, some
of which (like avarice and lust) hardly qualify as moral. Wilson
has to distinguish the truly moral feelings from their "wilder
rivals," much as the utilitarian John Stuart Mill tried to
distinguish the higher pleasures from the lower ones. These moves
invoke an objective moral law by which feelings or pleasures can
be evaluated, but where is such a law to be found?

The best part of Written on the Heart is Chapter 13, where
Budziszewski provides a brilliant "Christian Appraisal of
Natural Law Theory." Natural law is not in any sense a substitute
for divine revelation or saving grace. For a Christian the Bible
is the paramount authority on moral questions, but the Bible itself
teaches that God has a witness (general revelation) to the pagans.
Indeed, the heartfelt admission that there is a moral law and
that we have violated it is often the first step that brings the
unbeliever to faith. C.S. Lewis's apologetic in Mere Christianity takes exactly this approach. Of course the law written on the
heart is obscured by what psychologists call "denial,"
and modernists far surpass the ancient pagans in inventing strategies
for denial. In Budziszewski's words: "With a head filled
with false sophistication that tells him that right and wrong
are invented by culture and different everywhere, the new sort
of pagan mistrusts his own conscience and views guilt as a sign
of maladjustment that therapy will remove."

Most modern ethical thinking, Budziszewski explains, goes about
matters backwards. Modernists assume that the problem of sin is
mainly cognitive -- that we don't know the moral law and
are doing our best to find it out. Unfortunately for us, the problem
is mainly volitional. We know well enough the difference between
right and wrong, but we obscure our understanding so we can do
as we please. That is why the primary task of Christian natural
law philosophy is not to prove the existence of the moral law,
but to expose the devices of the heart by which we conceal the
truth from ourselves.

The concept of natural law makes sense only if our lives have
a purpose. Consider two influential statements of the human condition.
The first, by the neo-Darwinist George Gaylord Simpson, states
that "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process
that did not have him in mind." This is modernity's official
doctrine of creation, and it provides no foundation on which moral
reasoning can build. As accidental by-products we might as well
do whatever gratifies our strongest feelings, or helps us to get
whatever it is that we happen to want. All else is pious humbug.

Now consider the famous words of the Westminster Catechism: "Man's
chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him
forever." From that statement we know that a moral law exists,
and it consists of those precepts that teach us how to achieve
our chief and highest end. If we start there, we can read what
is written on our hearts.